"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Will Arnett shows his more dramatic side in Bradley Cooper's Is This Thing On?, playing a man who falls into a vat of stand-up quite by accident as he's dealing with his recent separation from Laura Dern (who is also going through it). It's stand-up fantasy - no hecklers - set in the bustling New York scene - where there would definitely be hecklers - but we'll allow it because it all makes us SMILE. SO. MUCH. No, seriously, I was smiling throughout. At a time when a lot of cinema seems to go dark and caustic, even when trying to be funny, it's nice to see something so hopeful. Not to say there aren't dark patches, but these stand out as necessary contrast to the rest. Cooper's camera has a great immediacy and sense of place, whether we're over the shoulder in the metro, or walking into a busy club or a wild kids' birthday party. We are THERE. And he's given himself a very funny best friend role - most characters get to be funny, even the kids, and certainly not just the real stand-ups who populate this world. Relatable, playful, and touching. But then, I've always been on team "find yourself a hobby".
At home: Not my favorite from Albert Brooks, Lost in America has him and his wife (Julie Hagerty) solve their mid-life crisis by buying a Winnebago and leaving L.A. to "find themselves". It immediately goes awry, and in a way that I found rather frustrating. I'm usually on board with Brooks' neurotic comedy, but here, he perhaps hits the wrong nerve, and I don't find the situation funny despite their being many great - rather deadpan - comedy scenes. With Garry Marshall's casino manager, with the job placement clerk, with the hot dog stand kid... But the leads don't do it got me. Bad choices, bad reactions, and I found them annoying. And while, on paper, the idea that the transamerican trip is cut short before it gets very far at all is a funny twist, it throws the pace of the film out of whack. We discover that we spent way too long deciding to leave for there to be much incident on the road before it's all over. It therefore feels like a few random sketches with people we meet along the (short) way and not a lot of substance.
18 shorts by different directors make up Paris Je t'Aime, each one in a different neighborhood, and all concerned with falling, or being, in love. There are meet-cutes that you'd love to follow longer, tragic tales of grief, and stylish oddities (the one with the mimes, for example, and the one horror short, and no, it's not the Wes Craven one), in both French and English, ending on the perfect bilingual Feist song. I perhaps have too many favorites to list them all, but the last few I found particularly funny and/or touching. Gena Rowlands writes herself a witty role as an older woman finally forced to divorce. and Margo Martindale writes a French essay cribbed with mistakes as she falls in love with the city while travelling alone, but perhaps not lonely. Closer to the middle, I absolutely 'ship Fanny Ardant and Bon Hoskins, and felt my heart glow for the paramedic and wounded man in Oliver Schmitz's short. The Coen Brothers humiliate Steve Buscemi humorously, and used to working in Hong Kong, Christopher Doyle offers a wild salon story in the city's Chinatown in that style. But in terms of style, I give the award to Tom Tykwer (Run, Lola, Run) for his imaginative two-hander between Natalie Portman and vision-impaired Melchior Beslon. I would have loved to read that the other films in the Cities of Love series were good, but apparently, Cupid only really struck once(?),
I thought calling Of Unknown Origin "Robocop vs. a big rat" was hyperbole until the final reel, but... Peter Weller is a good dad, an attentive husband, a great handy man, and someone also a high-level banking executive, so there's really nothing that warrants him being cursed with a giant, and extremely smart, killer rat trying to destroy his perfect life, except the pun "rat race", which is the only reason I can see as to why we get so much stuff at the office (I'm sure we could care less in the middle of a creature feature). The rat turns him into either Ahab or a Lovecraft investigator, according to your cultural touchstones and director George P. Cosmatos has some fun with it. It's basically a dark comedy about a rat who Home Alones a guy, just as his co-workers nibble at his chance for advancement. I could do without the cat death, but it was expected, and the punchline is a little weak, but there are some cool night terrors in there, and I'm sure people living in big cities are going to get the shivers. Montreal as New York can't be the only city with a rat army.
Based on true court cases of 15th-Century France, The Hour of the Pig (AKA The Advocate) stars Colin Firth as a chick magnet lawyer from Paris who thought practising in the country would be simple and relaxed. Instead, he finds sex, murder and all manner of inequity, but is forced to seriously defend farmyard animals in open court. It's absurd and the movie knows that, casting the story as a raunchy black comedy, and in that sense, it's pretty amusing. Ian Holme is hilarious as the priest who doesn't really believe in anything, for example. But we weren't expecting this amount of nudity, or sex scenes in a Medieval court drama (even though we watched the American edit, which cut some of it!). However, if animals are going to be treated like people (namely, the pig accused of murder), then people are going to be treated like animals. The absurdity that has followed us into the present day is that there is "one law for the rich..." and here, the hierarchy of "personhood" is on the same scale as the animals which are everywhere in the film.
I love the opening titles of Truffaut's Two English Girls and how it acknowledges it's status as an adaptation of Roché's "Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent" (he also wrote another love triangle novel, "Jules et Jim", which Truffaut fans might just recognize, both are based on Roché's life). The body of the film, however, tells me it's not a novel that would interest me, personally. But cinema tells stories more efficiently than books, and what I might have found tedious in prose, I might fight marvelous on film. Truffaut avatar Jean-Pierre Léaud meets two English sisters, one warm and open, trying to match him with the other, sickly and aloof. And if the story isn't really up there for me, it's that I don't buy the love affair with the latter. Could be that I fancy Kika Markham's Ann myself. Could be that the stylized performances don't sell this rather intellectual love. The characters intersect with the art world, pushing Truffaut to painterly tableaux, and so it goes with the rendering of the prose as well, affecting unnatural dialogue, epistolary devices, and his trademark fast-paced narration pulled directly from the book's pages. Everything is at a remove as a result, but I do appreciate the kind of love on show - one that keeps sacrificing itself for the other's happiness because it thinks it's rational.
The thing I remembered most about Chaplin, the biopic, is that David Spade's review of it on SNL's Weekend Update: "Chaplin? Craplin." And no wonder. It's really rather dull, with a tedious frame tale/narration opportunity, and an over-focus on melodramatic biographical detail. Which bores me to tears, seeing as I'm only really interested in the film making aspect of the bio. We hit the big ones, but they get lost in the unending line of Chaplin's wives. At one point, director Richard Attenborough stages a sequence like it's one of Chaplin's slapstick comedies, but it feels out of place in the otherwise Oscar-baity grand British drama of it all. He's assembled an all-star cast, often to just do walk-ons - very deep bench in this - and Robert Downey Jr. can certainly do the physical stuff, if not the accents, but I kept imagining the film as it might be today, with Timmy Chalamet obsessively learning the routines for three years before jumping into the role. There's a line in the film that has Chaplin say "If you really want to know me, watch my films", and I agree. There's nothing here that Limelight doesn't sum up better.
One Film for Every Year Since Film Existed[1912] The Cameraman’s Revenge: Leave it to the Russians to make an early stop-motion film using real insect carcasses and about decadent, adulterous bugs. A lot of fun!
[1913] Suspense: Lois Weber becomes the first American woman to direct a film with this one (also, write and star in it), a tightly-edited home invasion short that has a lot of sophisticated techniques behind it - POV shots, split screens, mirror shots, car chases! - showing that Charlie Chaplin really needs to redeem the tramp's image (in the next couple years).
[1914] Cabiria: Set in and around the historical events surrounding the Taking of Carthage, Cabiria is a huge and influential Italian epic with enormous sets, great location work, surprising special effects, live animals, and dangerous stunts. I admit I got lost every time we were in capital H History, because that's not the heart of the story. That instead lies with two heroes - a Roman soldier and his super-strong slave - who (eventually) rescue the title character, a little girl who, in the wake of her town's volcanic destruction, ends up in Carthage. My mind wanders when these two aren't on screen, as perhaps my handle of Ancient History isn't as strong as I would want it to be. Nevertheless, an eye-popping piece of cinema, and unsurprisingly an influence on Lang, Griffith, and DeMille.
[1915] The Tramp: While it features mostly unremarkable slapstick, only really picking up during the farm scenes, what feels so fresh about The Tramp is the eponymous character himself. Chaplin had been playing him in Keystone shorts for the past year, originally in the Mabel shorts, but here, he's a more fleshed-out hero (or anti-hero), and truly Chaplin's screen persona for the most successful part of his career. Very, very interstitials, and we just understand SO MUCH from just his body language and expressions. The Tramp character may have appeared before, but that was all episode zero to this solid introduction.
[1916] One A.M.: Chaplin doesn't always play The Tramp. Here, he's a wealthy man coming home late from a bender and having the hardest time getting to bed, and yet, to me, there are signs that this is just the Tramp's DREAM of what being wealthy means. I don't care if the film never confirms my oneiric theory. In any case, very proficient Chaplin, with surprising mechanical gags and a lot of dangerous physical comedy. One of the great and relentless ones.
[1917] The Immigrant: On the sea voyage to America, everything is on gimbles to great effect. As soon as the Statue of Liberty is in sight, no worries, the immigrants start being abused. It never changes. Part 2 is essentially just one big "can't pay for dinner" sequence, but it's great, too.
Books: Featuring strips loosely adapted from key episodes of Disney's television show, Alex Toth's Zorro (The Complete Dell Comics Adventures) is something the artist himself didn't consider his best work. That, after being reprimanded for omitting redundant narrative captions, he declared he wouldn't give the project his best effort. Perhaps just goes to show that even "phoning it in", Toth can't help but bring magic to the page. After reading that, I feared the collection would be a wordy slog, but it's really not too bad, and Toth's focus on shadows and cinematic choices wins the day - efficient line work that can render both dashing and comic expressions and poses beautifully (and don't get me started on his wonderfully dynamic horses - Hi-Yo, Tornado!). The nicest surprise is that there's a measure of serialization borrowed from the television show, where we might expect a comic book status quo. Events in one story affect the stories to come, at least, early on. By the time we do settle into a status quo, we're riding high. Toth was well ahead of his time considering these were originally published in the late 50s - he may not have thought highly of the scripts, but his knack for storytelling and slick shadowy art could easily fit the 1980s and beyond.
Weird story: Starting in the late 90s, whenever I would referee university-level improv tournaments and felt one of the Metropolitan teams haughtily looked down on us "regions", I would ask if they they were up for an imposition like "In the style of Gogol". They blenched, I smiled, and we moved on. Truth was, I'd never read any Gogol. I knew "The Nose" because of a Québécois ska song about it, but that's it. After more than 25 years, I finally crack open Petersburg Tales, containing 5 short stories that all take place in the former Russian capital, all feature some kind of dream, nightmare or hallucination (even if the reader isn't always brought out of it, in my opinion), are in some way all about the self-destruction, and are all really funny, in a dark, Russian kind of way. I devoured it (in French translation). I love Gogol's constant deviations, his long sarcastic enumerative descriptions, his structural twists that find ways to continue a story after it seems plainly over. His sarcasm about the St. Petersburg and its bureaucratic, cosmopolitan society made me burst out laughing several times. And yet, there's a poignancy there too, thinking on how the fate of his characters so often mirrors his own, dead from a mysterious illness (what reads as simply stopping wanting to live) in his early 40s. It's like he lived, and died, his fiction. Okay, improv players, watch out, I'm ready now.
RPGs: After a months' long hiatus, our Call of Cthulhu game picked up again. and we're still in the Deadlands (at least, what I think are the Deadlands, I'm not up on my lore), on a cruise ship, each room in a different "time", running from lizard men, drifting towards a giant black cube... Let's just say this isn't the kind of material I thought I'd be put through when I created my dilettante author character. On the plus side, got to draw my first Elder Sign, on a closet door our giant gravedigger could hold as a shield. On the plus side, escaping from flying sharks in the halls, we ran into what turned out to be a painting in our starting point cabin. A massive fumble walking out of there "killed" said gravedigger (a beloved character), trapping him in the acrylic (it's not even OIL!!!) forever, holding that shield so now we're carrying his remains everywhere because it's got a ward of protection. The physical stuff is now up to our cowboy (he's up for it) and the dead PC's player picking up a trans seaman NPC until we get out of this dimension (not that it seems likely we ever will). To date, the character hasn't succeeded at a single roll (whether by the GM or the player), so it's looking like they're cursed. Okay them, let's just walk into that giant cube, shall we?
We're very close to the end of The Fires of Ra mega-adventure for Torg Eternity, polishing off Act 6 and getting into Act 7, with the promise of an ending next session. So Team Beta (a terrible name that has only stuck to troll me) steals the villains' decoy plane (the Evening Falcon) and escape Uganda (UGANDA!), then stage a mission to take down Mobius's flying WMD. Bit of dogfighting, but not too much, leaving Core Earth jets to die horribly while they infiltrate a ship filled with mechanized zombies - the only crew, as the High Lord has been lured away by his NPC archenemy. They deactivate the "crew" and the reality-changing weapon at the heart of the ship, but find that the villain team found another way aboard and are running the bridge, from where the heroes must cause an overload and blow it to smithereens, hopefully after they escape. The fight begins, Lady Hourglass manages to control the mind of the Realm Runner whose job it is to set the overload, it's past 10h30, cliffhanger!
Best bits: Fighting a living brain with a robot body Wunder-Mind, the Realm Runner tricks him into getting grabbed by a magnet crane (to be fair, the Super-Wrestler's idea, but he'd mishapped his way into a mining cart heading for a furnace) and the Aztecan Warrior spins him his axis before knocking his fishbowl head off with his club, like some kind of pinata. The Deadlands Preacher shot the brain to "Wunder-Splat" as it tried to crawl away. The escape from the hanger involved blowing a hole through its massive doors (only the factory robots could open it). The Aztecan proved adept at using the Falcon's "landing claws" to rip planes to shreds, when the pursuing Nile Empire planes took off at the same time and in the opposite direction. Intersection of death. As Act 7 started, my mention of the Evening Falcon provoked a "You mean, the Beta Jet?" (grrrr). They even christened it with champagne. The Realm Runner used Science to jam the enemy formation protecting Mobius's ship. Aboard the thing, the ghost haunting the Preacher reared her ugly head and caused a bunch of Mishaps that made him lose his way and get cornered by hordes of zombies - twice - as the rest of the team got on with it. A card play made the bay doors open under the stelea spike powering local reality - one false move and it would have fallen out and converted a big chunk of the Middle East into the Nile Empire (it still fell, but only after deactivation). Interesting wrinkle for the boss fight: The Aztecan played a card that allows him to "turn" one of the subaltern villains, but it's a very difficult roll; perhaps the Bromance card the Super-Wrestler just played on him will allow for a Persuasion Fastball Special...
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